Photography…Is this the end?

 I was reading Chris Anderson’s article “The New Industrial Revolution” in the latest issue of Wired http://www.wired.com/ . The article goes on about how more companies are able to custom make products, cheaper and faster. At first I thought GREAT, more products, more photography.

Then I read this “a researcher at the University of Cambridge has developed a technology that will allow you to create a 3-D file by rotating the object in front of your webcam”WHAT?I Googled Cambridge University 3-D webcam and this is what I found

See also http://mi.eng.cam.ac.uk/~qp202/

For a while now I have heard that CGI was gong to replace product photography. My coment about that is that most of the stuff in the world (at least what I photograph) was not created on a CAD machine and would be too expensive to create as a CAD and that 3D scanners were still out of reach to the average manufacturer.

But this can make any webcam into a 3D scanner with no or very little work by the operator

Now granted, this technology is not available YET! And that could be a few years away. Also I don’t know what type of computing power is needed.

But lets now stop there. Ever hear about Giga-pan? http://www.gigapan.org/ They are the ones who came up with a way to make HUGE photos from a common point and shoot by shooting multiple photos and stitching them together.

Now lets add another, are you familiar with Photosynth? http://photosynth.net They have come up with a way to create a 3-D experience by stitching together photos from multiple sources 

Think of the applications.

Think beyond product, think beyond video

Remember, how do you predict the future? Think Cheaper, Faster, Higher Quality.

With this in mind, how far fetch is to think that we could attach 100 small video cameras around a football stadium and be able to offer a 3-D Immersion experience. Maybe not with tactile interaction, but with the ability to sit where ever you want, even on the field. Maybe even to look into the eyes of the quarterback.

Imagine a Church or Banquet hall with a few cameras mounted throughout. Who wants photos when you can experience the event over and over again?

Now, when I first saw this I must admit, I was scared. Then I remember the Photosimiley by Ortery http://ortery.com/ These type of “Photographer in a box” systems have been around for a while now. Companies I know that have bought them have them sitting in a corner never getting used. So I thought to myself, why would this new scanning tech be any different?

Then I got the idea, Hey maybe I should buy into a system like this (when they become available) and offer it as a new service.

We still need something to do with then renderings after we have them, but I’ll leave that up to the web designers

What do you think?

This entry was posted on Friday, February 5th, 2010 at 8:13 am. It is filed under Industry News and tagged with 3-d, CAD, CGI, computer, future, photo, photographer, photography, scanner, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.